newtown

friday and saturday june 3rd and 4th

NewTown strives to make people aware of innovative visual, media and performing arts as accessible, enjoyable necessities in an enlightened society. NewTown is often “a laboratory for new and unusual presentational formats.” These formats best fulfill our goals: to bring new audiences to today’s cutting-edge art, while providing artists with unique and challenging contexts in which to make new art. As an organization run by working artists, NewTown is also committed to advancing regional alternative arts through advocacy for funding, access to venues and, most importantly, payment to artists.

For more about NewTown or to make a donation, please visit http://www.newtownarts.org/about.php

Commencer Une Autre Mort by Jacob Cooper, Video and Music

The tragedy and treachery of Bizet’s Carmen, gets fractured, and flickered into a new meaning of the title phrase, “Commencer Une Autre Mort”, in which the Don Jose promises his former lover a new life through death, now repeated endlessly, mocking the compassion, terror and pain we now rationalize away in the thrill of operatic hyperbole.

Brooklynite Jacob Cooper’s list of accomplishments belies his youthful status as a doctoral candidate in composition at Yale School of Music. Among the many highlights and awards, Jacob’s opera, Timberbrit, probes the psychic purgatory in an imaginary reunion between Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. So, what’s not to love in that!?

Implosion of Light and Sound I by Huckleberry Lain, Video & Languis, Music

The first in a series of short 3D computer animation and electronic music collaboration under the title Implosion of Light and Sound, is a modern, computer generated form of traditional mosaics using simple cubes, appearing and disappearing in gentle rhythm of light and sound.

Huckleberry Lain (aka Paul Shepherd) is a dynamic addition to the L.A. arts scene splitting time between running his own multidisciplinary arts series, pixel (+) frequency, working with Iota Center, producing his own experimental animations and, in the Fall, assuming the Artistic Directorship of NewTown.

Languis, an L.A. music collective of founding member Cohen on guitar, keyboards and vocals, as well as John Girgus on guitar, keyboards, bass and vocals, construct sonics that interact, much like color and shape evolve and dissolve in paintings. The melodic warmth they bring to more experimental sonic works developed through songwriting and experimentation in the studio.

Echoing Spaces by Dennis Miller, Video & Music

Echoing Spaces explores a number of virtual environments in which primary elements recur and morph both immediate succession and at different times throughout the piece, always in varied form. The overlapping imagery and its manipulations are displayed in a restricted color palette, maintaining a focus on the primary geometric objects in a slowly evolving sinuous dance.

Dennis Miller’s works have been seen throughout the United States and Europe. He is on the Music faculty of Northeastern University in Boston, where he founded and is artistic director of the Visual Music Marathon (www.2009vmm.neu.edu). His music and artworks are available at www.dennismiller.neu.edu .

Libangbang by Chia-Chi Tseng

Chia-Chi Tseng is a native of Taiwan who got her MFA from John C. Hench Animation and & Digital Arts division at University of Southern California. She combines her art education background into poetic works melding computer and traditional animation techniques. She continues to produce her own animation art while working in “the industry” doing compositing, stop-motion and digital animation.

Episode 21: Hidden by Daniel Maldonado, Video & Mike Vernusky, Music

Hidden (commissioned by Music Anthology) is an audiovisual ascent to a veiled landscape that constantly shifts between light and shadow, emergence and deformation, repose and departure. Obscured shapes of sound morph across environments while astronauts emerge with amputees in abandoned religious theme parks.

Filmmaker Daniel Maldonado reinvents and reinvigorates the richest tropes from New York’s underground art culture. Finding his reality through the lenses of contrast. His works, ranging from stop-motion animation, experimental and mockumentary works have been screened worldwide, including Slamdance, Chicago underground and other festivals.

Austin-based composer Mike Vernusky writes music for phonographic, theatrical and filmic environments, primarily through the use of electronic media and live performance. His works, conveying a textural language melding sound metaphors with impossibility, veil and combine space. His works have been heard at major festivals in Tribeca, Los Angeles, Seoul, Rome and Rotterdam, among others